A Virtual Organisation (VO), or in a more informally, a "group", is a collection of people with permission to access particular services.

By joining a group, and having your request accepted, you gain access to the services associated with that group. This is done through Grix.

The default BeSTGRID VO is the /ARCS/BeSTGRID group, it provides access to all the 'freely shared' resources provided by BeSTGRID. Other groups provide increased levels of access to specific resources for a specific project, team, or institution associated to those VOs. In the procedure below /ARCS/BeSTGRID will be used as an example, just subsitute a different VO to apply for membership.